Online Keyword Research Tools

Looking for keywords? Wondering how to find the best keywords for your AdSense? Finding profitable keywords is key to PPC, SEM, AdWords & AdSense.

It’s no surprise that choosing a good mix of key phrases is one of the keys to successful online marketing on the search engines.

Well, I just thought I’d share an online set of tools that really makes it fast, easy and affordable to maximize your online marketing budget and generate the most revenue from your AdSense.

Check out the Free Keyword Tool at Keyword Country.

How to View Banner Ads on the Google Content Network

Check it out, all you SEM, PPC, Online Marketing & Advertising gurus. I’m pretty sure there’s no other tool like this anywhere on the net.

With Yahoo! Search Marketing, you can see other competing text-ad creatives the moment you pick a keyphrase, but not so easy with Google. You can Search Sponsored Links on Google, but it doesn’t let you see any banner creative. (Now that I think about it, they should just put a banner up there for you. I don’t know why they don’t.)

I was troubleshooting the Google AdSense that appears on this blog, and stumbled onto a way to view graphic ads running on the Google content network, related to a particular keyphrase, on demand.  

I haven’t tested it much. I’m not sure how long this will work or if it is supposed to work. It could be a glitch. It may have to do with an upgrade to AdSense that this blog post reveals. Maybe it’s already well-known to online advertisers. I might be violating some terms of use I clicked long ago in publishing this, but unfortunately, this type of tool is not currently available within the Google AdWords interface, and it’s extremely useful to be able to see what your competition may be like if you’re planning on running a banner on the content network for an AdWords campaign. 

Here’s the link to try the Keyphrase-Based Banner Ad Viewer.

Check it out, try it, and let me know what you think.

Color Scheme Designer: The Best Online Color Picker

If you haven’t stumbled upon the online Color Scheme Designer, I don’t think you’ve lived.

Maybe you’ve seen a Pantone color guide , which is great for designing for print, or a Javascript Color Picker or an HTML color picker form control you can use in your CMS system, but this web page goes way beyond that. Not only is this tool one of the most amazing DHTML / Javascript applications I’ve ever seen, it is extremely useful piece of software that I hope never goes down. The original version of the online color picker at WellStyled.com now has a new URL: www.colorschemedesigner.com. 

Using this tool you can interactively create and modify palettes consisting of 1, 2, 3, 4 or more color tones and play with the hues, saturation and brightness to capture a pleasing palette for use in any design. It sort of reminds me of Kai’s Power Tools Gradient Designer — online, on a web page you can bookmark.

Petr Staníček, the website’s creator is one of my heros. I’m moved to donate. It’s that good.

North Korea Tests Nuke, Missle; Obama, Hillary Talk

In case you missed it, North Korea recently detonated a nuclear bomb and also tested a long-range missle. I thought it may be worthwhile to dissect the Fox news report on this so we’re all clear what the heck is going on.

The timing of the test caught U.S. officials by surprise, though President Obama noted talked about the fact that recent North Korean statements previewed such a move.

So… even though we knew they were going to build and test nukes eventually, we had no idea they had them already. Boy, I’m so relieved Obama’s talking about this.

The White House rushed to respond talk, with Obama condemning talking about the detonation in a written statement (probably penned by a staffer) and then during brief remarks a short talk in the Rose Garden before heading to Memorial Day services. He called on talked to the world, asking the world to “stand up” to North Korea. 

So… after a bunch of talking, Obama suggested that The World ought to do something about it. Now that’s leadership.

But the United States was already at risk of encouraging such behavior, said analysts, who advised talked to the Obama administration to take a firm stance against Kim Jong Il and his regime. 

So… analysts said we brought this on ourselves, us dastardly Americans. It’s always our fault. Which analysts?

John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations warned … that North Korea has been encouraged in such “belligerence,” since its 2006 test was followed by the resumption of the six-party talks – discussions talks among the U.S., China, Japan, Russia and the two Koreas aimed at encouraging North Korea to give up its nuclear program. Those talks later stalled again.

Oh, I see. So… basically by only ever talking about the problem and never doing anything about it, Kim Jung Il realizes he can test nukes, build missles, or do whatever else he wants. Those crazy dictators are so megalomaniacal. Let’s keep going.

Stephen Bosworth, special envoy for North Korea policy, said just two weeks ago that “everyone is feeling relatively relaxed” and “there is not a sense of crisis.” Bosworth  said “dialogue talking and negotiation more talking” is the best course…

So… who’s Stephen Bosworth and what is he smoking? That’s all you can come up with, Steve? It’s no biggie? Let’s discuss it some more? What part of Nuclear Bomb Detonation and Long Range Missle Test don’t you understand?

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said talked about it in March that there’s nothing the United States could do about such a firing, though officials nevertheless warned talked sternly to North Korea not to go ahead with the test.

So… our Defense Secretary basically told Kim Jung Il in advance we wouldn’t retaliate. Great Strategy Bob. Which officials talked sternly, and to whom? I wonder… when [we] warned North Korea not test nukes, did Kim Jung Il reply, “Or what?” 

North Korea fired the missile a week later.

Of course they did. We are all talk. Our words proclaimed we wouldn’t do anything about it (other than talk some more).

The U.N. Security Council condemned talked bad about the action, and then North Korea threatened to restart its nuclear reactor. 

Well that proves they’re nuts. Power your cities cheaply with totally clean energy! Now there’s a wacky idea!

Not only could North Korea be sharing information about nuclear technology with Iran, but North Korea’s behavior could embolden Iran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also rejected a proposal to “freeze” nuclear work and rejected talks with world powers on the matter, according to Reuters. The news agency reported that the Iranian navy also sent six warships into international waters. 

So… two of the biggest whack-jobs on the planet are helping each other build nukes. I wish I was making this stuff up, but truth is stranger than fiction.

Obama said the tests pose a “grave threat” to international security and that the world “must take action in response.”

Not I Will Take Action. Not We Will Take Action. Not The United States of America Will Take Action. Oh no, now that He’s elected, no Global Thermonuclear War is going down on His watch. This is the world’s problem now. I see. It was the world who loved Obama, and the world who elected Obama. We’ll see if it turns out to be anything other than the USA coming to the World’s Rescue as history repeats itself over and over.

According to the State Department, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke with the Japanese and South Korean foreign ministers Monday morning about the tests and later planned to speak with her counterparts in China and Russia.  ”Secretary Clinton is engaged in intensive diplomacy,” spokesman Ian Kelly said in a statement. 

So… I bet Kim Jung Il is really scared now that you sicked Hillary on him, o wise American left. She’s clearly on track to talk him to death. I love this whole idea of “intensive diplomacy”. What exactly does that entail? Waterboarding? Or just a very stern talking to?

American Idol AT&T Vote Count Conspiracy?

Adam Lambert & Kris Allen

Fox News recently reported that prior to the final vote on Season 8 of American Idol, AT&T provided phones with free “power texting” capabilitites to Kris Allen fans at a few Arkansas parties. No such promotion was held in San Diego for Adam Lambert. This controversy has led many bloggers and blog commenters to cry foul, and complain that Adam Lambert should’ve won after all.

MTV says the American Idol winner and runner up are “downplaying reports” of the controversy, but even Late Show’s Jimmy Fallon referred to the mixup as “TextGate”.

But conspiracy? C’mon. If you believe there were just under 100 million votes recorded for the two candidates, just based on the sheer numbers alone, AT&T would have had to go to a serious number of Kris Allen parties, give out a serious number of power-texting-capable phones, to a serious number of fans to make a dent in a pool of votes that size. I’m calling this one a simple case of Yet Another Marketing Blunder By A Corporate Goliath. 

My $0.02 on the subject: Kris is arguably a better musician and more skilled arranger, while Adam is by far the better vocalist. Is American Idol a singing contest, or a search for a great entertainer? Either way, American teens win, and hopefully we’ll see more of both of them.

How to find all the email addresses inside some text

Have you ever received an email that has been forwarded several times and you wanted to reply to all? It’s a pain in the you-know-where to copy and paste all the email addresses manually. 

So I made a tool that rips email addresses from arbitrary text.  

Enjoy, and don’t abuse it. I don’t support sending SPAM. That is NOT what this tool is for.  It is also not for harvesting email addresses from websites. If you are engaging in this type of behavior, you should read this post.

Installing Magento E-Commerce on CentOS

This guide assumes you have a dedicated server or VPS running Cent OS, optionally with WHM and CPanel and have root access via SSH. We’ll be using WHM/CPanel to configure our install.

If you’re running on DreamHost, this is a more specific tutorial. (Though I recommend Atjeu.)

Important note: This may be obvious, but I wouldn’t recommend doing this during an important, high-traffic time or on a production server. Make sure you have a backup of all sites hosted on your box before doing this! If you break something — don’t blame me!

Okay, get ready to install Magento, the ECommerce Platform for Growth!

Before you begin

(a) Check to make sure you Web server has PHP 5.x, MySQL 5.x and PEAR. 

If you aren’t sure what versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL you have on your server, it’s a good thing to know and easy to find out. Just make a PHP file, e.g. info.php, put the following code inside it and upload it to your web server into the public_html directory of the account under which you intend to install magento:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Browse to this phpinfo file you just uploaded, e.g. http://yoursite.com/info.php, and look at the software versions of PHP and such.

Most modern WHM/CPanel hosting setups already have these items ready to go. In my case, I wanted to install Magento on a custom-configured server, and I had PHP 5.x and MySQL 5.x but I had to install PEAR.

(b) Install PEAR (if you already have PEAR installed on your server, this would be a good time to update PEAR.)

I checked on this page at PEAR, and even though I was running CentOS, the most appropriate example for me to install PEAR was the Mac OS X example. Typing

#> curl http://pear.php.net/go-pear | php

In a command prompt via SSH Worked perfectly for me.

At the screen where it shows you the suggested file layout…

I entered 1, and used /pear as my $prefix.

After the installation completed, I typed pear help and my output looked very similar to this:

(c) Update your web server software.

If you need to upgrade any of your web server software (recommended before proceeding!) login to your server via SSH and run /scripts/easyapache as described here.

Installing Magento

(1) Download the Magento installer

I skipped the registration by clicking the No thanks link, but I recommend signing up for access to the Magento Community.

The easiest and fastest way is to use the Downloader. The Downloader install is a small PHP application that you download and run in your browser. The Magento Downloader requires you have created a database, uploaded the sample data, and permissions of 0777.

Keep this window open and proceed to step 2.

(2) Download the Sample Data.

The Sample Data is required for the installer to work correctly. You’ll need this at step 5.

(3) Uncompress the installer archives.

You should now have two folders, one containing the Magento Downloader installer, and the other containing the Magento Sample Database. 

(4) Create your online store database.

The easiest way to do this is by logging into CPanel for the account. By default, this is at http://yoursite.com/cpanel

 - i. Create the database. If your CPanel account username is ‘foo’ and you type ‘magento’ into this box, by default your website database name will be ‘foo_magento’. 

- ii. Create a database user. If your CPanel account username is  ’foo’ and you type ‘storusr’ into this box, your DB username will be ‘foo_storusr’. (The password does NOT get pre-pended with the account name.)

- iii. Give the db user ALL privileges on the db. You can tighten up the security later, but for the installer to work, it needs to be able to do everything.

(5) Install the sample database.

Find the Magento SQL file that generates the Sample store database. In my case, this file was found in the ‘magento-sample-data-1.2.0′ folder, named ‘magento_sample_data_for_1.2.0.sql’.

To do this, click to the phpMyAdmin interface from CPanel, click to the database name on the left column (nothing in it yet) and then to the Import tab over to the right. Click browse. Locate the SQL file, select it, then click GO.

After several moments and approximately 1,400 SQL statements later, you should have about 233 tables in your database.

(6) Set up a folder with the proper permissions where you want to install Magento.

In my case, I chose the root level of the site, but it is probably advantageous to use a folder or subdomain, ‘shop’, for example. Next, access the filemanager, select the ‘shop’ folder you created, and click ‘Change Permissions’, giving the folder 0777 or all permissions. Again, this is just so the installer can do its thing. The permissions can be set back to their defaults after the installer is done. 

(7) Using an FTP program, upload the contents of the Downloader to the ‘shop’ folder.

When that’s done, you can finally run the Magento Downloader Installer web app.

(8 ) Start the Magento Downloader install

This is as simple as going to http://yoursite.com/shop/downloader in your browser and following the prompts as shown in the series of images below. 

In step 1, the Magento Downloader connects to the MagentoECommerce website to download the latest install files.

Step 2 requires you to agree to the licensing terms.

Step 3 requests that you select your default localization, or language settings.

In step 4, you tell Magento how to connect to the database you created in part 4 above.

Step 5 is where you set up your Magento store admin username and password.

And at last… 

You’re All Set!

Get ready to experience Open-Source eCommerce Evolved.

Before you continue to your store, please make a note of your encryption key (Magento uses it to encrypt passwords, credit cards and more).

(9) Check to make sure the front end works.

You should see the demo store. Click around and check it out.

(10) Login to the backend and check to see that works. 

Where to go next

Google Chrome Aw Snap Error Page

The strangest thing happened to me today. If you use Google Chrome, maybe you’ve seen this before, but for me it was a first.

I had to take a screen shot. How Mac System 6 circa 1988 is that?!

No matter what page I navigated to, I had no luck. Chrome was completely broken. And unlike many of the posts about this problem, I’m not using Symmantec Endpoint software, and adding –no-sandbox to the startup script in the properties dialog had no effect.

In the end, I had to create a new user profile, and restart my computer before Chrome started working again.

HandBrake: How to convert VOB to AVI, MP4, M4V

A client recently sent me a DVD with some clips they wanted for their Website. It had been a while since I converted DVD video for the web, and before I’d been using AVS Video Converter, which is a really simple $49 shareware app that works great and supports a ton of video file formats.

For this project, though, I happened to be on my laptop and didn’t feel like spending any money, so I figured I’d see what free open-source video conversion tools were out there.

Well, I just discovered the best free video converter for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux and I must say, it is truly impressive. It is called HandBrake. HandBrake is a GPL-Licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder. I tested version 0.9.3 on Windows XP.

HandBrake converts video from VOB and nearly every other source file format to a handful of modern codecs, including AVI, MP4, M4V, MKV, and OGM. It reads DVDs and outputs digital video files you can playback in Windows Media Player, DiVX Player or QuickTime Movie Player with just a few clicks. You can set up multiple video files to convert in a queue and process a batch of video clips without babysitting your box.

It has built-in presets for QuickTime H.264, iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and Apple TV, both legacy and newer formats. It has high profile conversion presets for animation, constant quality bit rate, film and television. It also has presets for gaming consoles, PSP, PS3 and Xbox 360.

The HandBrake GUI on Windows XP

You can fine-tune any preset with the advanced settings – and there’s a ton of them on 6 different tabs from the main interface.

You can crop the source and resize. You can detelecine, decomb, deinterlace, denoise and deblock. You can change the aspect ratio and go from non-square to square pixels and vice-versa. You can do video and audio together or separately. You can select fom multiple audio tracks and use AC3 or MP3 audio.

All the settings you define for a video conversion job can be named and saved for later, and what’s more, you can see the command line parameters you’re actually setting up by generating the output to the query editor. You can then use the generated query via the command line interface to the tool to use in .bat files, AppleScript, or even from a PHP or Python application via CLI.

Overall, this software is truly an awesome piece of work and it seems like the perfect freeware for all your video conversion needs.

How to Synchronize Folders on Windows

Good buddy of mine, KJ, the IT Guru where I work just told me about this Free Folder Synchronizer from Microsoft.  You can download SyncToy 2.0 from Microsoft.com.

Be sure to check out the help file, which shows how to schedule sync jobs.

Works perfectly, it’s fast and it’s free!